Notes on the APSA Conference

Maybe I can finally put into words the utter mind games that APSA played on me…It was one frustrating, disheartening, soul-zapping weekend. And then it was over. The next day, around noon, a knock at my door. After the first week living apart and fighting a lot because of the separation, my boyfriend chose smartly to come and surprise me. A very loving pick-me-up only a couple days after my world cracked open. Perhaps I should be grateful for the mind games--my previous experiences at the Rock have never led me to these kinds of extreme brinks of inadequacy before. Maybe I’m just breaking through to something, excising some inner barrier. Too soon to tell.

It started frantically enough. We didn’t leave early enough to make any panel on time. We tried to pair up. I really should have gone with my initial conference buddy, but when I thought that another student was willing to go to the panel titled, “The ‘Glocalization’ of U.S. Foreign Policy: City Responses to International Issues,” I stayed put and the other groups ran off to their panels. I ended up waiting a minute or so with that student for some of the others. Once they arrived, I discovered they weren’t interested in being any later to a panel than they already were so the group decision was that we had to go to a panel in the building we were in. I didn’t want to get hopelessly separated from everyone by going to the panel I would much rather have gone to, but I really wish I had! Group dynamics and disorientation and time ticking away don’t combine well. I lost the best chance I had to find something matching my interests at the APSA conference. It would have been helpful to attend an urban policy session because of my designer’s focus on city planning, but alas, I missed the opportunity, then and later.

The first session we attended turned out to be a roundtable on twentieth-century international thought. The first panelist had been doing research on the interwar period. Luckily, my feeling of being extremely out-of-place was echoed by a commenter at the end who criticized this panelist and some of the others for focusing on such an ancient decade. At least one other student really liked that commenter, too, because what he exposed was so ridiculous anyway. The first speaker’s best moment was mentioning the failures of translation—he’d apparently heard a Bulgarian translator resort to an unconventional technique with the statement, “The speaker has made a joke…it is too complex to explain to you…you are to laugh.” The second speaker had an interesting paper, in which she responded to a harsh moment at a past APSA conference, in which she most strongly felt the lack of whimsy. Her paper concentrated on political satirist playwrights, which was exciting. These first two presenters were the most palatable, whereas the third speaker was a really boring historian blabbing convolutedly, speaking with no real point. The fourth presenter spoke in monotone and much too quickly. One of the most intriguing things about this panel was the moderator’s suggestion-request for all the presenters to situate the discussion in some cohesive context by bringing up books and thinkers that are under-appreciated and perhaps nearly-forgotten.

Because the first panel wasn’t really my cup of tea, and I feared I wouldn’t get to go to any panel that interested me, I split from the group to experience a panel that seemed to mesh with my interests: “Rethinking Marxism & the Future of Radical Environmental Politics.” It had little to do with radical environmental politics. The extent to which Marx was a focal point was minimal; it encompassed the first paper and came to a dead stop. After that it was a lot of Derrida, Butler, Foucault, Habermas, Nietzsche, Dewey, and more obscure names. It might have been more appropriately titled, “Rethinking the Postmodernists & the State of the Animal Rights Movement.” The moderator began by describing the Democratic National Convention. He called the attempted effort of “Recreate ‘68" "befuddled,” and pronounced that the left had been redeemed by the positive Denver coverage. After taking a class on the sixties with a staunch Nebraska Republican (the logically-flawed, absurdist type), the moderator's attitude towards his subject was refreshing.

The first paper was titled, “Marx, Animals, and Anti-capitalist Politics,” presented by MacDonald. His paper pivoted around the quote, “I am not an animal, I am a human being!” from the movie Elephant Man. At one point, he mentioned that this statement would be more poignant if used instead of “Workers of the world unite!” He ruminated, “Do workers dream of sheep?” and mentioned John Bentley Foster’s Marx’s Ecology and Jan Berger’s “Why Look at Animals,” neither of which I had ever heard of and which I now would like to read. His paper was the easiest to follow, but perfect clarity was still hard to come by. His clearer moments involved the following contributions: to link Marx with animal rights, you could make the argument from the fact that Marx was obviously critical of factory work and aware of animal use in factory production, as well as from his concern with human exploitation and alienation; making a distinction between organic species-ism (Marx) and alienated species-ism (capitalism); constructing the assertion, “Under capitalism I am not a human being.”

Unfortunately, one of the presenters couldn’t make it because, as the moderator explained, in these tough times universities are cutting costs and the California system is one of the first to succumb. The talk I didn’t have the benefit of experiencing was titled “Radical Environmental Political Theory: Heidegger’s Unruly Children,” and though the moderator tried to summarize the paper briefly, that didn’t really help me understand its basis. I wonder how this would have changed my experience of the panel to actually have a presenter address the “radical environmental politics” part of the session. Maybe he would’ve lost me with the theory language just like the others, though. But the dig is in not knowing!

The third speaker’s paper, “On the Subject of Green Solidarity: Marxist Engagement and the Demand of Democratic Possibility,” was the most befuddling. He seemed to have an intention of making a difference or something, there was such intensity in his presentation, but the content of the paper was untranslatable into the language of my world. I’m such a Midwesterner. East Coast elitism and pomp (expressed through the priorities of American Academia/intellectualism, wherever the intellectuals happen to hail from) drive me nuts.

“Animals, Sovereignty, and the Politics of Eating” was the final presentation by graduate student Young. She began with the premise, “There is and always has been a little shit in the meat.” In the course of her talk, she covered Fast Food Nation and Nietzsche—the hysteria of the carnival. Occasionally, her paper changed tones and made sense, but for the most part, the minutes of her speech just dragged on, dragging me further down into my inadequacy pit.

The respondent was the most interesting speaker of the panel. He began with the images from the beginning of City of God, the Brasilian movie about gang warfare in Rio de Janeiro: you see the close-up of a knife getting sharpened, a chicken getting decapitated, the feathers plucked, and the bird cooked with spices, then close up of a live chicken watching his buddy getting marinated, the chicken, antsy, wobbling, the chicken jumping to escape, then the chase, and then you come into the pivotal moment of the movie that we return to later. But this montage brings up important questions of how much awareness the chicken has of what is happening and what will happen to it. Can a chicken think? If so, how does a chicken think? The respondent went on with his notes—Yes, we all know, capitalism sucks; Fast Food Nation is right on, there was not enough discussion about plants, about the boundary between plants and humans/animals; we need to answer the question, ‘What is it that’s good in the environment,’ so we can judge what is wrong; his mother’s cat is addicted to valium; there is a dog training school operated by Christians ("Based in what, the Old Testament?" he commented; I happen to know that the program he was referring to is run by the Monks of New Skete. Also, I believe that the absurdity is less a reflection of Christianity, which has so many different manifestations, many of which intellectuals tend to ignore, and more a reflection of the absurd obsession of the well-to-do, and those who wish they were, with their dogs); the presenters should aspire to more specificity, less selectivity/erasure; Wittgenstein – “If lions could talk, we wouldn’t understand them”; and his touching comment, “When the crocs get the tourist, I’m for it. They bought the ticket!” I especially liked that he pointed out to Young that there’s not just shit in the meat, there’s a little shit in the water, too, even organic fertilizer, there’s shit in that, too. He rehashed MacDonald’s ideas: Marx is very human-centered, the main thing is how we relate to each other; it’s something that needs to be figured out if Marx is going to be used in discussion of animal rights.

Afterwards, I met up with the majority of our little delegation to the conference, who exchanged notes on a panel about international diasporas. My frustration was still racking me, but I started walking along with the others to lunch; along the way, I started to crack. I couldn’t keep from crying. It was all too hopeless. I was too inarticulate, too inadequate, too unlike everyone else there. I wanted to be someplace else, to feel connected, but I was in this gross sprawling mall-hotel and the people around me were strangers. I couldn’t stop myself from the negativity so, without the possibility of explaining myself to the others while all teary-eyed, I had to abandon the idea of lunch and go off to recover.

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“And in some ways, Barack Obama is a little like Kung Fu Panda”
– Slavoj Zizek

As though I weren’t having a bad enough day as it was, one that necessitated I take a break from lunch with the others and walk back to the hostel to vent my frustration into my pillow, then recoup with lunch in peaceful solitude during the third panel session, I ended up getting sick. When I found the others (how lucky I was) and found out where Zizek’s talk would be, I discovered that I wasn’t the only one feeling frustrated. My friends in the class were communicating similar sentiments. But my stomach wasn’t happy enough to discover the redemption of the day. I missed the first half of the Zizek lecture, and I really wish I hadn’t. I’m hoping to eventually find audio of the lecture online. Surely someone was recording it! What I did get a chance to hear, cheered me up in my weary state. Zizek’s grasp of history, popular culture, and psychology was conveyed in the most accessible manner of any presenter I heard all day. His use of movies to tie his talk together certainly shared elements with the “Radical Environmental Politics” panel, but he made the movies relevant to his talk in ways the others failed to do because he wove in his insights from the films skillfully whereas the others just used movies as accessories, illustrations of points, not embarking points for thought.

Some of my unfulfilled wishes from the conference: having a chance to attend more panels, such as panels on urban policy, education, and environmental issues; going to the book room the last day; attending the unique events (there was a film screening!); feeling comfortable and competent enough to pose questions to the panel. Aside from the endearing term “Zizekian,” the main thing I learned from the APSA conference was about how not to present a conference paper. My guidelines: in the interest of speaking so that people can understand you, limit your paper to a length shorter than recommended, then read it at a slow enough speed that someone could follow it, use technical jargon sparingly, incorporate pop culture references to circumvent the audience’s discomfort and growing alienation from reality, and be jovial—it makes for a better weekend, better interactions, better panel cohesion.

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